Homo gautengensis is a species name proposed by anthropologist Darren Curnoe in 2010 for South African hominin fossils otherwise attributed to H. habilis, H. ergaster, or, in some cases, Australopithecus or Paranthropus. The fossils assigned to the species by Curnoe cover a vast temporal range, from about 1.8 million years ago to potentially as late as 0.8 million years ago, meaning that if the species is considered valid, H. gautengensis would be both one of the earliest and one of the longest lived species of Homo. Since Curnoe's 2010 description, recognition of the species has been limited. The classification of most of the fossils referred to H. gautengensis was controversial before the description of the species and continue to be controversial to this day. Some palaeoanthropologists have gone as far as to declare that there is little reason to consider H. gautengensis a valid taxon. Research history Palaeoanthropologists vary in their recognition of which hominin fossil represents the earliest record of the genus Homo (and in what range of morphology the genus should encompass). Most of the fossils contending for the position have been dated to between 2.4 and 2.1 million years ago, and their classification is highly controversial on the genus level. Along with fossils such as the mandibles AL 666 from Ethiopia and UR 501 from Malawi (both probably exceeding 2.1 million years in age), a skull designated Stw 53 was once one of the primary contenders. Today, the fossil commonly seen as the earliest fossil specimen of the Homo genus is LD 350-1, a fossil jaw excavated in 2013 in the Afar Region in Ethiopia, dated to about 2.8 million years old. Stw 53 was discovered in August 1976 near Krugersdorp, Transvaal in South Africa and was described in 1977 by palaeoanthropologists Alun R. Hughes and Philip V. Tobias as a skull probably from an early species of Homo. Though many palaeoanthropologists recognised the fossil as representing a species of Homo, possibly H. habilis, this has never been universally accepted, many instead seeing it as a specimen of Australopithecus africanus. Though the site of the fossils was initially dated to over 2 million years old, work from 2012 suggests that the site was significantly younger, at 1.78–1.43 million years old. In 2010, anthropologist Darren Curnoe reviewed the large amount of fossil hominin specimens from South Africa and concluded that some of the fossils were sufficiently different from